Otis College of Art and Design is pleased to host the Los Angeles Portfolio Day on January 15, 2017 from 12-4pm!

Bring your portfolio for an informal review by representatives from art and design schools, and learn about their programs of study. Portfolio Day events are held across the country, high school students, parents, teachers, guidance counselors and college transfer students are encouraged to attend.

In acoustical engineering, “tuning the room” is a technique for measuring the specific sound properties of an enclosed space and then adapting the environment to improve its acoustic reflections. New York-based artist Anna Craycroft applies this technique both literally and metaphorically to the Ben Maltz Gallery for her exhibition Tuning the Room. Craycroft’s exhibition asks that we consider how the specific characteristics of an environment shape our experience within it, and how we become attuned in return.

Robin Coste Lewis won the National Book Award for Voyage of the Sable Venus. Her writing has appeared in The Massachusetts Review, Callaloo, The Harvard Gay & Lesbian Review, Transition: Women in Literary Arts, VIDA, Phantom Limb, and Lambda Literary Review. She has taught at Wheaton, Hunter, Hampshire, and the NYU Low-Residency MFA in Paris. Lewis is a fellow of Cave Canem and of the Los Angeles Institute for the Humanities, as well as a Provost’s Fellow in Poetry and Visual Studies at USC.

Solmaz Sharif’s first collection, Look, was recently published by Graywolf Press and is a 2016 National Book Award finalist. Her poetry has appeared in the New Republic, Granta, Poetry, and other journals. Her first collection, Look, was recently published by Graywolf Press. A former Stegner Fellow, she is currently a lecturer at Stanford University and lives in the Bay Area.

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Identifying Dean Tavoularis (‘55, Fine Arts) as Francis Ford Coppola’s production designer does not fully encapsulate his design career in and beyond Hollywood. His rich collaboration with Coppola led to such classics as The Godfather films, Apocalypse Now, The Conversation, One From the Heart, Rumble Fish, The Outsiders, Tucker, and New York Stories.

According to Tavoularis, “when I was young, I attended art school, [but] there were no film schools to speak of then, though this was L.A. I went to movies and lost myself in them. Their settings registered but I was not aware of art direction in film and I never said to myself: “This is what I want to do.”

“Very often with Dean,” remembers Coppola, “even early on when I didn’t know if I agreed with him, I learned that his instincts were very good and that later on I would like very much his idea even if it wasn’t immediately something I liked."

Other directors with whom Dean collaborated on his more than 30 films and five Academy Award nominations include Arthur Penn (Bonnie and Clyde), Michelangelo Antonioni (Zabriske Point), Roman Polanski (The Ninth Gate), Wim Wenders (Hammet) and Warren Beatty (Bullworth).

“He attained a higher reality, that of poetry,” notes writer Jean-Paul Scarpitta. “Any form of spectacle is for him a visual feast, a challenge, and a source of inspiration. In his art, he doesn’t dwell on magic, visual deception, optical illusion, or unreality... His penetrating eyes allow him to watch and feel things deeply, which leads him to capture what others are not privy to see: the gimmicks, the artifices, the tricks, the element of life upon which the veil of illusion is cast. In his mind there is a clear parallel between painting and cinema, in that he considers one and the other as different yet compatible means to create an illusory world which only exists in a dimension of its own."